A Modern Ode to the Mona Lisa, Guided by Google’s Hive Mind

Google any famous work of art, and you’ll get an unpredictable grab bag of results. A quick search of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper turns up hundreds of copies of the original painting, but you’ll also find a rendition with My Little Pony heads replacing the disciples or a group of zombies gnawing on a bloody Jesus. Search for Mona Lisa, and the results are even more bizarre. “In most of the searches, the original is scarce amongst the results,” says artist Fraser Clark. “Instead, you find thousands of home-made pastiches, odd mashups and bastardizations.”

A hybrid Mona Lisa is comprised of all the images included in the flip book. Image: Fraser Clark

All of the images were scaled to the same size, printed on a single sheet of paper, then French-folded. Image: Fraser Clark

The book can be removed from its box for maximum flipability. Image: Fraser Clark

“Barack-Obama-as-Mona-Lisa--56045.jpg.” Image: Fraser Clark

“Barack-Obama-Defacing-the-Mona-Lisa--70325.jpg.” Image: Fraser Clark

Clark would know. The Glasgow-based artist made an entire flip book of the different Mona Lisa images found online—or at least 240 of them. “With the internet continually expanding, it’d be impossible to archive every single Mona Lisa,” he explains. Even still, it’s a good effort. Each of the 240 Mona Lisa pastiches was scaled to the same size, printed on a single sheet of paper then French-folded. In a nice touch, the edge of the book depicts a hybrid Mona Lisa made up from every image in the book. The Mona Lisas are arranged by file name. Some are simply numbers like “45675.jpg,” while others are more descriptive. “A personal favorite is ‘Barack-Obama-as-Mona-Lisa–56045.jpg,’ which features Barack Obama’s face as a replacement, as well as Capitol Hill in the background,” Clark says. Naturally, this is followed by “Barack-Obama-Defacing-the-Mona-Lisa–70325.jpg,” which shows the president, black Sharpie in hand, scribbling a mustache on the famous painted lady.

Clark says he was surprised by how contemporary some of the images he found were, noting that a breaking news story can produce a handful of Mona Lisa-inspired images. The flip book, while mostly just a clever art project, is an unexpected mirror on our present-day culture.“It’s possible that today, more people may have seen a Marge Simpson Mona Lisa on Google, than visited Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting at the Louvre in Paris,” he says.